Break the mold with connected TV: 3 ways to prove the success of your campaigns

As a rapidly growing channel, connected TV (CTV) inherently breaks the marketing mold with unprecedented measuring capabilities never before available to TV advertising. It delivers an experience that has the impact and premium look and feel of traditional television. At the same time, as with digital channels, every impression can be tracked and accounted for.

Still, one of the biggest opportunities for marketers as they invest in this emerging channel is understanding how best to measure campaign success, particularly since CTV straddles both digital and traditional advertising tactics. But, as consumers’ viewing habits continue to make the leap to CTV, so too must the strategies of marketers hoping to keep up. The key to making that leap? Designing campaigns that prove the channel can engage these audiences.

In an effort to help marketers attribute success to their CTV advertising efforts, I’m sharing three ways to ensure upcoming CTV strategies are driving undeniable performance.

1. Eliminate waste through reach and frequency controls.

While traditional television is effective at reaching users at scale, it’s not efficient when it comes to controlling frequency. In fact, advertisers waste much of their budget over-targeting the same households, leaving a single viewer to see the same ad as many as 25 times within an eight-week flight.

With CTV, though, ad buyers can still reach a broad audience, with over half of US broadband households streaming content. Simultaneously, they can exert full control over their campaign by purchasing media on an impression-by-impression basis for targeted and personalized advertising experiences. By setting frequency caps, limiting the number of times a single viewer or household sees a particular ad, advertisers can optimize the value of their reach in real time. This level of control drastically reduces waste, allowing marketers to get more out of each CTV dollar spent and each impression delivered. To prove the effectiveness of their CTV campaigns, marketers should set goals for ad frequency and reach in each campaign segment and optimize toward them.

2. Find value outside of age and gender.

With traditional TV advertising, marketers have been mostly limited to targeting within audience traits like age and gender. However, as the name implies, CTV devices are connected to the internet – allowing them to join the digital-device ecosystem in all its data-filled glory.

As a result, demand-side platforms and cross-device companies can tap into CTV’s digital audience information, accessing data points like users’ online purchase history, on-site engagement, and behavioral data (including interests such as cars or pets). These added insights allow marketers to deliver more targeted and relevant CTV ad experiences to the audience they want to reach, leading to better, impactful advertising. Not to mention that advertisers can continue these consumer conversations across other connected devices based on the data received from CTV experiences.

3. Use attribution to gain powerful insights (online and offline)

Another advantage of CTV comes in the form of attribution, or the ability to measure and track the actions consumers take in response to CTV ads. This opens the door to impactful insights that not only help optimize current campaigns but also allow for future strategic planning. Using data to understand CTV attribution online and offline, marketers can now gain insight into exactly which audiences, locations, media partners, etc. are driving the most action. This ultimately allows them to become incredibly precise in the way they buy media.

CTV’s growing audiences are helping to connect the complete customer journey. With this transition to a more connected, digitally driven world, we’ll continue to see better advertising results across all connected devices, translating to increasingly relevant ad experiences for viewers and more return on ad spend for advertisers.